Ruth Bader Ginsburg has been an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court since 1993.

Ginsburg was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1933. After graduating from Cornell University, she attended law school, first at Harvard (1956-1958) and then at Columbia, where she received her law degree in 1959.

After completing her studies,Ginsburg worked as a law clerk for Edmund Palmieri, Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.

In 1970 Ginsburg co-founded the quarterly Women's Rights Law Reporter, the first law journal to focus exclusively on women's rights and the “feminist criticism” of law.

Ginsburg spent several years in academic posts at Columbia and Rutgers Universities, studying international law and becoming expert in Swedish jurisprudence. In 1972 she became the first tenured female professor at Columbia Law School. That same year, she served as the first Director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Women's Rights Project. In 1973 she became General Counsel of the ACLU, a position she would retain until President Jimmy Carter appointed her to the United States Court of Appeals in 1980.

During her time as a professor and ACLU counsel, Ginsburg worked to advance various feminist causes. She helped write the ACLU brief in Reed v. Reed (1971), where the Supreme Court struck down an Idaho law that preferred men to women as executors of estates.

Ginsburg's most famous case promoting gender equity was Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld (1975), in which she represented a male plaintiff to demonstrate a particular law’s disparate impact. Her client was a young widower, Stephen Wiesenfeld, whose wife had been the couple's principal breadwinner. After his wife’s death, Mr. Wiesenfeld received Social Security survivor benefits lower than those a woman would have received. The Court ultimately ruled that "[b]y providing dissimilar treatment for men and women who are … similarly situated, the challenged section violates the [Due Process] Clause."

During her ACLU tenure, Ginsburg argued a total of six cases before the Supreme Court, winning five.

With the retirement of Justice Byron White in 1993, President Bill Clinton nominated Ginsburg to fill White’s vacated seat. Ginsburg was not Clinton’s first choice, but her husband, Martin D. Ginsburg, successfully lobbied the President to consider her for the post. The Senate ultimately confirmed her by a vote of 97-3.

During her confirmation hearings, Ginsburg's position on Roe v. Wade was a focal point of discussion. She previously had voiced criticism of the 1973 Supreme Court decision that upheld women's right to abortion, causing some senators to wonder whether her support for abortion rights might be less than enthusiastic. But in fact, Ginsburg merely doubted the legitimacy of the sweep of the Court's decision, arguing that the states would soon have achieved the same result on their own. The Court, she explained, should merely have overturned the particularly restrictive state laws at issue in the case.

As for abortion itself, Ginsburg said that the right to terminate a pregnancy was "something central to a woman's life, her dignity…. And when government controls that decision for her, she is being treated as less than a full adult human being responsible for her own choices."

Ginsburg has repeatedly expressed her support for restrictions on the death penalty, sentencing guidelines, and parole decisions.

Justice Ginsburg rejects a "strict-constructionist reading" of the U.S. Constitution, maintaining that the document's framers were too locked into their own time, gender, and class to be reliable guides on modern-day legal issues.

Perhaps Ginsburg's most famous work was her 1996 opinion in United States v. Virginia et al. Writing for the majority, she upheld the 1992 appellate court decision ordering the admission of women to Virginia Military Institute (VMI). More controversial than the substance of the decision, which left intact the right of states to provide single-sex educational institutions for women, was Ginsburg's favorable citation of Richard Morris' claim that the history of the Constitution is the "story of the extension of Constitutional rights and protections to people once ignored or excluded." This perspective views the Constitution as a malleable document which can be used as a vehicle for the expansion of rights.

Also among Ginsburg's more notable rulings were the following:

She ruled to limit the scope of the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty of 1996, in Williams v. Warden Taylor (2000).

She ruled against the death penalty in Ramdass v. Angelone (2000). Two years later she ruled against capital punishment for juvenile murderers, in In Re Kevin Sanford.

She ruled to restrict the rights of police officers to apply "probable cause" searches merely because a suspect flees, in Illinois v. Wardlow (2000).

She ruled to oppose the lengthening of prison sentences for particularly dangerous criminals, in Garner v. Jones (2000).

She dissented from the Supreme Court decision that effectively gave George W. Bush the victory in the 2000 presidential election.

After Democrats had won control of Congress in the November 2006 mid-term elections, Ginsburg opined that the relationship between lawmakers and judges was generally better when Congress was in Democratic hands. At a 2007 judges' conference on judicial independence, she said, “Particularly since the 2006 election, I am pleased to relate, rapport between Congress and the federal courts has markedly improved.”

In 2007 Ginsburg dissented in the Supreme Court case of Gonzales v. Carhart, which upheld the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003. Writing about the case, Ginsburg stated: “Women, it is now acknowledged, have the talent, capacity and right ‘to participate equally in the economic and social life of the nation.’ Their ability to realize this full potential, the Court recognized, is ultimately connected to ‘their ability to control their reproductive lives.’”

In 1977 Ginsburg and feminist Brenda Feigen-Fasteau co-authored a report titled Sex Bias in the U.S. Code for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Identifying an array of federal laws that allegedly discriminated on account of sex, the report advocated the ratification of the then-pending Equal Rights Amendment. In this publication, Ginsburg:

called for sex-integration in "college fraternity and sorority chapters," and for replacing them with "college social societies"

called for sex-integration in prisons, because “If the grand design of such institutions is to prepare inmates for return to the community as persons equipped to benefit from and contribute to civil society, then perpetuation of single-sex institutions should be rejected.”

reasoned that laws against prostitution were unconstitutional because "prostitution, as a consensual act between adults, is arguably within the zone of privacy protected by recent constitutional decisions"

urged readers to reject the notion that men should be regarded as “breadwinners,” and women as “homemakers”

In 2007, Forbes magazine named Ginsburg as the most powerful female lawyer, and the 20th most powerful woman, in the world.

In 2008 the New York Timesreported that Ginsburg held assets of somewhere between $11 million and $50 million, and that, as such, she was most likely the Supreme Court’s wealthiest member.

In an interview during a visit to Cairo, which aired January 30, 2012 on Al-Hayat TV, Justice Ginsburg advised the Egyptian people to ignore the U.S. Constitution in preparing their own new constitution. Instead, Justice Ginsburg lavished praise on several post-World War II foreign documents such as the South African constitution (which she called "a great piece of work"), Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and the European Convention on Human Rights. As for her own country’s constitution, Justice Ginsburg said she “would not look to the U.S. Constitution if I were drafting a new constitution in 2012.” It was just too “old,” she said.

The South African constitution contains a clause protecting free expression. But unlike the right of free speech under the American First Amendment, the South African constitution says that the right of free expression does not include “propaganda for war” or “advocacy of hatred that is based on race, ethnicity, gender or religion, and that constitutes incitement to cause harm.” These vague exceptions go beyond the very limited “incitement of imminent violence” exception to the First Amendment that our courts have recognized. Instead, they intrude into the very areas of potentially controversial speech that the U.S. Constitution protects.

On the other hand, the South African constitution enshrines such entitlements as “adequate housing,” “reproductive health care,” and education (including “adult basic education”) as constitutional rights, along with creating a constitutional right to a clean environment.

Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms more closely resembles the U.S. Bill of Rights, with one notable exception. Under Section 33 (1), parliament or the legislature of a province may, through legislation, effectively override the various rights and freedoms enumerated in the document such as freedom of religion, freedom of expression, protection from unreasonable searches and seizures, the right against self-incrimination and the like. In other words, the legislature is supreme.

The European Convention on Human Rights, like the South African constitution, contains basic rights but with restrictions on the exercise of such rights even more far-reaching than South Africa’s restrictions. For example, Article 10 states that “[E]veryone has the right to freedom of expression,” but that right can be restricted for such reasons as “the protection of health or morals” and “the protection of the reputation or rights of others.”